Fortunately, a new breed of business software integrates all the needed commerce and business functionality into a single ecommerce platform via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. With an infrastructure that unifies business applications and the data that feeds them, it is possible to create relevant, engaging and personalized online experiences.
The changing market represents a vast opportunity for businesses to improve their relevance and expand their market in the online world. Researchers predict e-commerce will be 17 percent of U.S. retail sales by 2022, according to Digital Commerce 360. The U.S. will spend about $460 billion online in 2017. These figures will continue to climb as mobile and internet use expand both in the U.S. and in developing markets around the world.

One of the biggest advantages of listing your products on Amazon is that you can use its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program, which handles shipping for you. WP-Lister Lite for Amazon supports that feature, but keep in mind that if you use it, you’ll need to direct any purchases made on your WooCommerce store to your Amazon listings. To get started, you’ll want to check out an online guide to configuring both platforms to work together.

Unilog is a global technology company that delivers powerful, affordable eCommerce solutions for the B2B marketplace. Our cloud-based eCommerce platform and product data enrichment services help distributors, manufacturers, and wholesalers increase online sales, reduce cost to serve, and enhance their digital channel. Unilog is an ISO 9001:2008- and ISO 8000-certified company with North American headquarters outside of Philadelphia, PA and international headquarters in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit www.unilogcorp.com.

Ecommerce Platforms is a review site that shows the good, great, bad, and ugly of online store building software. We strive to provide easy to read reviews that will help you choose which ecommerce platform is right for you. We maintain an affiliate relationship with some of the products reviewed as well, which means we get a percentage of a sale if you click over from our site (at no cost to our readers). Feel free to follow us on Twitter, comment, question, contact and ENJOY.

Another way to analyze popularity is to tie it in with where customers are going when they leave a certain ecommerce platform. The reason this is interesting is that it gives you an indicator of which of the companies have kept up with technologies and made improvements to bring in additional customers. A quick market share search on Shopify shows that the Shopify company is gaining most of its customers from Bigcommerce, Big Cartel, and Volusion. Bigcommerce is still stealing some customers from Shopify, but it used to be the number one place that people would go after Shopify. We assume it's because of the Bigcommerce pricing.

Absolutely. Depending on what you want your e-commerce store to do or look like, you can choose from a variety of available WooCommerce themes. Once you've chosen a theme, you can begin to customize it within the "customizer" section of your WordPress dashboard. This will allow you to make simple changes like adding your personal logo or changing the background and font. Coding knowledge is not a requirement for using WooCommerce, however for users who know basic HTML or CSS, customization can be taken to a whole new level. We recommend that beginners to WooCommerce choose a theme that best fits their needs and then learn how to customize it further through our knowledge base articles or community forums. As your customization skills increase, you will be excited by all the possibilities your WooCommerce online store has available to leverage.
WooCommerce – because it integrates into WordPress – comes with a lot of strong SEO features built right in. WordPress will give you feedback on your SEO right in pages and posts. This makes it easy to visually judge if your SEO on any given page or post is strong and also takes the pressure and thinking out of SEO. For SEO, it is certainly one of the best ecommerce platforms out there.
WP Engine is ideal for your ecommerce store because it is built for speed, easily scalable, provides simple staging, and total security. Ecommerce sites using WP Engine’s digital experience platform experience three-times more cart additions, 50 percent reduced page load, and three-times more checkouts. Check out the various plans we offer for any size business. Or check out our enterprise plans to take your enterprise level business up a notch.
While other ecommerce platforms use drag-and-drop editing, or even let you create your store from scratch if you want to, GoDaddy does something different. It uses ADI, which stands for Artificial Intelligence Design. This means it simply asks you a few questions, and then uses your answers to create a personalized store for you. This is what makes it the easiest ecommerce platform to use on the whole market.
This is fairly self-explanatory. One factor you want to look at is the number of search terms your site ranks in the top 20 for. The closer you are to page one in search results, the higher the chances of you drawing organic search traffic. The more keywords your rank for, the more traffic you get. Using data from Ahrefs, we looked at the average number of terms ranked on the first two pages on Google. In terms of my overall performance scores, live ranking data was only a small factor.

The site combines two different approaches to posting tracks: First, it indexes free music posted by all of its partner curators, and second, it allows users to post their own music directly to the archives. This synthesis of sources creates a mind-boggling library of tracks that you could literally spend months browsing through, whether you choose to do so by curator or genre. In addition, the site hosts a myriad of podcasts, and renowned radio stations such as Seattle’s KEXP frequently post live cuts from their studio sessions with big-name acts passing through. The smash tracks may lack some post-production, but they’re also free.

The Free Music Philosophy was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard,[5] Forbes,[6] Levi's Original Music Magazine,[7] The Free Radical,[8] Wired[9][10] and The New York Times.[11] Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of P2P, the cementing of mp3 as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century.[12] Organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.[4][13][14]
To start an online business it is best to find a niche product that consumers have difficulty finding in malls or department stores. Also take shipping into consideration. Pets.com found out the hard way: dog food is expensive to ship FedEx! Then you need an ecommerce enabled website. This can either be a new site developed from scratch, or an existing site to which you can add ecommerce shopping cart capabilities.
An example of the impact e-commerce has had on physical retail is the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days in the U.S. According to Rakuten Marketing data, in 2017, Cyber Monday -- which features sales that are exclusively online -- saw 68% higher revenues than Black Friday -- which is traditionally the biggest brick-and-mortar shopping day of the year.
An ecommerce platform is not a "one size fits all" solution that will work for everyone. All the ecommerce platforms discussed in this article are built for different kinds of business requirements. The pros and cons outlined are not about what's wrong with them. The curated list is designed to help you make a calculated decision and choose a platform that serves your needs best.
cleverbridge provides ecommerce and subscription management solutions for monetizing digital goods, online services and SaaS. Our cloud-based ecommerce platform simplifies recurring billing, optimizes the customer experience and offers comprehensive global compliance and payment capabilities. Leveraging cleverbridge expertise, technology and services, our B2C and B2B clients acquire more customers, improve retention and grow their revenue in international markets. cleverbridge is headquartered in Cologne, Germany with offices in Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo and Taipei. cleverbridge was named a 2018 European IT and Software Excellence Awards Finalist (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Solution of the Year); 2017 V3 Technology Awards Finalist (Best Business Application); 2017 SaaS Awards Finalist (Best SaaS Product for Ecommerce); and named an Accel EuroScape Top 100 Most Promising SaaS Company in Europe. The company was also named a 2016 SIIA CODiE Awards Finalist (Best Subscription Management Solution) and identified as a “High Performer” in the G2 Crowd Grid for Ecommerce Platforms, based on customer satisfaction and market presence.
In contrast, some of Volusion’s best features are its analytics and insight reports. These let you keep track of all your stock in one place. This is super useful, especially if you’re making the most of multi-channel selling over Facebook. This takes a lot of stress off your shoulders – with Volusion, you can sit back, relax, and easily keep your store organized.
Lack of payment processors can be troublesome at times, especially when other ecommerce platforms offer plenty of payment options. The global marketplace entitles Tictail to take a commission. However, the custom shop (which comes at a reasonable price on a yearly basis) frees you from paying anything additional to Tictail for each sale happening there.
WooCommerce is free to download and easy to setup, making it ideal for the small business using a WordPress website. The interface is modern and intuitive and creates beautiful websites using extensive and mobile-friendly themes. Plenty of add ons such as Instagram integration, table rate shipping and wholesale pricing can be purchased if businesses want to take it up a notch. It’s by far one of the best options for small businesses, due to its affordability and ease of content creation on WordPress to bridge the gap between content and commerce.

The first step to starting an eCommerce business is deciding what products you’re going to sell. Finding a profitable idea can be hard work, so be prepared to do some serious digging and thinking. It’s essential that you choose products with healthy margins that will allow you to turn a profit and scale the business in the future. Once you know what you want to sell, you’ll need to decide how and where you’re going to source the products. The four main methods of sourcing products and inventory are making, manufacturing, wholesale and dropshipping.

Of course, you could use a standard WordPress theme – many fully support WooCommerce. However, WooCommerce-specific themes are built from the ground up with the ecommerce platform in mind, so they’re often a smarter bet. There are some excellent free choices out there, and you can also find premium options that include more features for a set price.
Shopify – A popular choice among many SMBs, Shopify has features that let you sell online, on social media, and in-person. It lets merchants build and customize their ecommerce site through easy-to-use interfaces and templates. And it has features such as inventory management, reporting, buy buttons and more. It also has social selling functionalities for those who are active on sites like Facebook and Pinterest.
If you update a Subscription product price from $100 to $120, all those Subscriptions created at $100 are not updated to $120. You have to manually go to EACH subscription and update the price which is very time consuming when you have hundreds or thousands of subscriptions. There should be a bulk way to update all subscriptions pricing without having to go one-by-one through each active subscription.

Selz is very affordable, especially when you consider its features compared to comparably priced ecommerce platforms. Not only is it incredibly easy to use, but it also offers integrations for selling through WordPress, Facebook, and other independent websites. It also offers many security features and customer-friendly delivery options for merchants selling digital products.

Here's how @DogsMeowSA have harnessed #WooCommerce – and a love for animals – to meet the needs of pet owners while building a sustainable subscription business.https://woocommerce.com/posts/case-study-dogsmeouw/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=WooCommerce&utm_content=More%20Than%20a%20Pet%20Project%3A%20The%20Story%20Of%20Dogs%20Meow%20Subscriptions …
For my money though, comparing SaaS and deployed platforms is a bit too big of an ask. Comparing Apples with Apples is a good ambition but by their nature you have two very different types of fruit there. Magento site performance, for example, is almost entirely dependent on how well set up the store is. A good Magento developer can make it sing – but it takes time and expertise…. As a SasS solution the variance between Shopify sites should be much smaller.
Akshay is a passionate marketer and enjoys providing innovative and valuable insights to the blog. He is currently the Founder of a Global Content & Growth Marketing Agency, and loves to help startups, agencies and marketing managers grow their business. Interests that excite him include innovation, startups, health & fitness, meaningful experiences, golf & meditation.
At its core, e-commerce refers to the purchase and sale of goods and/or services via electronic channels such as the internet. E-commerce was first introduced in the 1960s via an electronic data interchange (EDI) on value-added networks (VANs). The medium grew with the increased availability of internet access and the advent of popular online sellers in the 1990s and early 2000s. Amazon began operating as a book-shipping business in Jeff Bezos' garage in 1995. EBay, which enables consumers to sell to each other online, introduced online auctions in 1995 and exploded with the 1997 Beanie Babies frenzy.
Windsor Circle's personalization platform allows retailers to create personalized, marketing campaigns to increase revenue, customer brand affinity, and customer value. With Windsor Circle, retailers can gain access to their 3+ years of eCommerce data - product, purchase, and customer data - and create segments based on these fields, as well as predictive data sets, such as predicted gender, next order data, future value, to power campaigns via email, social, direct mail, and more.

The devil is in the details, though, so when picking the platform for yourself, you should probably focus on things that are more niche in their nature, yet can mean the world to your business. And the complete list of those can be huge, so I urge you to do your own research and in-depth comparison once you have a general idea of the platform you’d like to try out.

You can see why Shopify scored top marks in this area. Features like these don’t just make running your online store possible – they make it easy and enjoyable too. Put simply, Shopify was designed to help people build an online store. That’s why it’s packed with these high quality sales features, which were specially created to support your ecommerce business.

Specially designed for startups and SMBs, YoKart is a turnkey and features rich ecommerce marketplace solution to build multi-vendor stores such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. While many other ecommerce platforms do offer a multi-vendor version, YoKart specializes in this particular field. YoKart, with its latest upgrade (YoKart V8) now packs an even bigger punch. It's multilingual and multi-currency features allow store owners to expand their reach on a global level. And then there is the plethora of payment gateways, in-built analytics tool, rewards and discount coupon management features.

You can play the songs before downloading them, but when you're ready to save the songs to your computer, click the FREE button to add it to your cart. Then, you can check out as if you were purchasing something by clicking Place your order. You'll be taken to a link to download the free music, and it'll also be saved in the Digital Orders tab of your order history.

Welcome to all free music seekers and thanks for stopping by! Here, you can find royalty-free music for your YouTube videos or projects (blog, vlog, podcast, social network, etc.). All we ask is to put the attribution in the credits. More info about the attribution can be found on every track’s page. The free music on this website is not a subject to any copyright issues. If you need a non copyrighted music for your coffee shop, bookstore, boutique, bar, lounge, reception, etc., feel free to use the FSM Team No Copyright Music Playlist.

OpenCart. OpenCart could be a great choice for small businesses without tech savvy employees. OpenCart is very simple to install and start using. It runs very quickly using simple code. OpenCart allows you to set advanced user privileges and separate access for users and groups. A simple code also has drawbacks; often for sale extensions and themes may not be up-to-date with security standards.